After years and years of on-again, off-again relations, quiet grumbling and likely more than a few private fantasies of more financially profitable partnerships, Port of Coupeville commissioners this week abruptly cut ties with the Greenbank Farm Management Group.

Despite being involved in ongoing negotiations for a new contract to start next year, and making a clearly unpopular decision before a large crowd of Greenbank Farm supporters, the commissioners effectively said, “Nope, we’re done. Thanks, but adios.”

While the basis for the 2-1 vote is understandable — to some, the dividends of decades of investment amount to crushed hopes for an economic engine that never materialized — this is indeed a sorry conclusion to a 20-plus year relationship.

To say it was poorly executed is an understatement. Rather, it smacks of blunder: A rash decision with little promise for success and an affront to the businesses and people who helped carry the farm through some tough years.

Port commissioners Marshall Bronson and John Carr, Bronson’s handpicked colleague who was appointed earlier this year, no doubt thought about the relationship with the management group and the farm’s fate for some time.

Their duty as port commissioners, a junior taxing district that exists largely to foster economic development, is to look at ways to best utilize public dollars.

Port commissioners are supposed to divorce sentiment from facts.

The farm management group’s contract is up at the end of 2015, and the port’s plan for succession is a mystery. Five months is a tight timeline for coming up with a new plan or group.

There was discussion in recent weeks about some kind of relationship with Washington State University. However, WSU and the port were quick to soothe what’s amounted to community panic with promises of “nothing has happened or decided, we’re just talking.”

Perhaps that remains true, but this week that assurance is highly suspect. Indeed, trust in the port commission has reached an all-time low with this action.

That two of the port commissioners would make such a surprise decision — oddly unbeknownst to the third commissioner — while the management group was negotiating in good faith, is bad governance.

While it’s true the Greenbank Farm was an expensive experiment for the port and hasn’t blossomed to profitability as hoped, this kind of maneuvering is unbecoming of elected public officials.